Regenerative Agriculture: Climate Solution or Yet More Coffeewashing?

The need for big, systemic sustainability movements in coffee is obvious.

The climate crisis, long anticipated, is well and truly upon us. 2024 was the hottest year on record, and the world is already crossing the 1.5°C warming threshold that the 2015 Paris Agreement hoped to avoid. Over the past few years, floods, droughts, wildfires, and other extreme weather events have battered coffee-producing countries from Brazil and Vietnam to Jamaica and Uganda. 

Coffee needs stable temperatures and reliable rainfall to thrive, and is thus highly susceptible to climate change. Some of the most vulnerable countries to climate impacts also happen to be key coffee producers, with millions of smallholder farmers most at risk.

Regenerative agriculture is often sold as a solution to the problem of climate change and coffee. And it very well could be! The concept is hard to fault: Very broadly, it is a holistic approach to farming that takes into account soil health and biodiversity while rehabilitating degraded soils and trapping carbon in the process. It is also an approach that Indigenous farmers have been practising for millennia. 

Recently, many of the world’s largest coffee companies, including JDE Peet’s, Nestlé, and Illycaffè, have begun building their sustainability campaigns around the concept. Multiple organisations, meanwhile, have launched specific regenerative agriculture certifications. The intent is laudable, but because regenerative agriculture doesn’t currently have an agreed-upon definition, nearly every organisation has a different interpretation of what it means and how it works.

It’s hard not to feel sceptical of this flurry of newfound interest. The coffee industry talks a good game when it comes to sustainability, but much of the time that is all it is: talk. I have written many times about the concept of coffeewashing—greenwashing for the coffee industry—and how it allows corporations to avoid criticism and push the costs of decarbonisation onto those further down the supply chain.

The relatively recent emergence of regenerative agriculture in relation to coffee is a hopeful development, but one that also feels ripe for misinterpretation or misuse. It’s worth asking: Who really benefits from this push—and will the widespread promotion of regenerative agriculture add up to anything more than a cynical marketing ploy?

The Climate Crisis and Coffee

It’s undeniable that coffee is under enormous threat from extreme weather events and human-induced climatic changes. The Global South countries where most coffee is grown are particularly vulnerable, despite bearing the least responsibility for the climate crisis.

A much-referenced 2015 report by the Climate Institute found that, by 2050, climate change is expected to cut the global area suitable for coffee production by 50%. Four years later, researchers from Columbia University increased that estimate, arguing that up to 75% and 63% of land utilised for arabica and robusta production, respectively, could become unusable.

The impacts on coffee have been ramping up for years, but 2024 was particularly bad, with extreme weather events such as droughts, heatwaves, floods, and landslides affecting many coffee-producing countries. 

But coffee is not only a victim of climate change—it also accelerates it. Although not as impactful as sectors like animal agriculture, coffee is still a key driver of deforestation and carbon emissions. The industry additionally contributes farm-level inputs such as chemical pesticides and fertilisers, waste from packaging production and disposal, and uses large quantities of electricity and water during brewing.

The coffee industry knows all this, and for decades has pledged to reduce its impact at all points in the supply chain, although much of the burden has been pushed onto farmers. Big companies often externalise the costs of climate adaptation and mitigation with opaque sourcing pledges that encourage sustainable farming practices while avoiding direct funding. Instead, they have relied on top-down approaches like subsidised loans, seedling donations, and corporate philanthropy.

At the same time, it is challenging to clearly communicate the risks facing coffee—terms like “sustainable”, “compostable”, and “ethical” have become so overused that they are mere buzzwords at this point. And although many companies have pledged to become “carbon-neutral”, which involves reducing some of their own emissions, such pledges also involve ploughing money into dubious carbon offsets that, once again, externalise the hard sacrifices and allow business as usual to continue.

Within this context, there’s a risk that regenerative agriculture could become similarly neutralised as just one more empty slogan. That would be a real loss, as such agricultural practices do offer transformative potential for the industry.

Regenerative Agriculture Is Older Than You Think

“Regenerative agriculture” was supposedly coined by the Rodale Institute, a nonprofit organic farming research organisation, in the 1980s. However, the actual ideas associated with the practice—a focus on soil health and biodiversity, intercropping and water management, and balancing productivity with the needs of the land and the people working it—go back a lot further.

Indigenous farmers have been using these techniques for thousands of years. As Bryony Sands and colleagues wrote in a 2023 paper for the University of Vermont’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Faculty Publication, “the farming techniques associated with the regenerative agriculture movement today have been practised for centuries, and in some cases millennia, by Indigenous and local communities around the world”. For example, Mesoamerican farmers were using the polyculture method of intercropping maize, beans, and squash, known as milpa or the Three Sisters, at least 3,000 years ago. 

Similarly, many coffee farmers have been practising regenerative agriculture, without necessarily calling it that, for decades. In Honduras, the cooperative Café Orgánico Marcala (COMSA) has been developing its own agricultural philosophy since its inception in 2001. 

Called the Five Ms—use of organic matter, micro-organisms, minerals, molecules, and grey matter—the philosophy is rooted in the concept of regeneration, Olvyn Hernández, COMSA’s enterprise manager, tells me. “We have a diploma program that every farmer member has to undergo to participate in our philosophy”, he explains. “For eight days we train farmers to understand a whole-life philosophy centred in regenerative agriculture. It is about cultivating our soil and our mind”.

Cooperativa Agraria Cafetalera Pangoa was founded in Peru in 1977, and has grown from 50 members to 700 today. Esperanza Dionisio, Pangoa’s former general manager and now a strategic advisor, says that the cooperative has been using organic practices for 25 years. “Organic is already regenerative”, she says. “It is about taking care of water, about biodiversity, intercropping”.

Both cooperatives work with the North America-based importer Cooperative Coffees. As the importer’s impact manager, Melissa Wilson Becerril points out, a lot of the framing around regenerative agriculture calls to mind a top-down, neocolonial approach to sustainability.

“Our view on regenerative agriculture is that it should regenerate what has been extracted”, she tells me. “In its current form, it is a colonial approach that ignores the impacts of 500 years of environmental and economic extraction, and treats the people who depend on this land and ecosystem as mere objects of intervention rather than subjects making decisions and taking action to preserve their livelihood”.

Additionally, Becerril says, for Cooperative Coffees the idea of regenerative agriculture goes beyond sustainable farming practices. “You don’t regenerate by buying one contract and shopping around for cheap coffee for the majority of your business”, she says. “Regeneration is a long-term, whole-business approach involving trade and governance”.

Coffee farmers are practising these methods across the globe. In Ethiopia, for example, the majority of coffee has always been grown in either agroforestry systems, where coffee is planted under a canopy of native trees, or in garden plots alongside food crops.

According to a 2025 study by a group of Ethiopian researchers led by Markos Makiso Urugo, “these systems enhance soil fertility, reduce erosion, and improve water retention … Beyond enhancing coffee quality, the system supports biodiversity by providing essential habitats for various plant and animal species and contributes to natural resource conservation”.

Encouraging more farmers to adopt regenerative principles is a good thing. Improved soil health and biodiversity, better water quality, and carbon absorption collectively benefit farms, farmers, their families, and the environment in general.

There’s an economic case for such practices, too: A 2025 report from the nonprofit Technoserve found that transitioning to regenerative agriculture could boost smallholder incomes by an average of 62%, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 3.5 million tons of CO₂e every year.

Regenerative Coffeewashing?

While many farmers have long used these practices, regenerative agriculture as a named concept in coffee is much more recent. When Nestlé launched its “Nescafé Plan” in 2010—an ambitious, decade-long investment in direct purchasing and sustainability—the term was nowhere to be seen. In 2022, when the company announced its updated “Nescafé Plan 2030”, regenerative agriculture was in the headline of the press release.

Part of the issue with this newfound focus on regenerative agriculture in coffee is that nobody agrees on what the term actually means. In 2024, the German nonprofit think tank NewClimate Institute published a report that looked at the corporate climate strategies of the 30 largest multinational food and agriculture companies, including Nestlé, Kraft Heinz, Olam International, and Coca-Cola.

“We found that there is really no common definition” for regenerative agriculture, report co-author Eve Fraser tells me. “There was a wide range in terms of practices and outcomes outlined, and the wording was very different from one company to the next, and some of them were extremely vague despite being presented as a key component of their strategies”.

This vagueness, Fraser explains, allows companies to avoid scrutiny about their exact practices. “They can implement it in a way that works best for them, [and] you can’t really evaluate them against one specific framework and say they’re not implementing it the way it should be implemented”.

Many of the companies Fraser investigated presented soil carbon sequestration—when carbon is absorbed from the air by plants and stored in soil—as a key component of regenerative agriculture. This is despite the fact that, as the report notes, “[carbon sequestration’s] potential in agricultural soils is heavily debated, and permanence of such removals is limited”. A 2024 article by Susannah Savage in the Financial Times described the debate over carbon sequestration as “lively”.

Pete Smith, professor of soils and global change at the University of Aberdeen, told Savage that while regenerative agriculture itself “makes a lot of sense,” and can have a lot of benefits, “the carbon angle has been oversold”.

Of course, the coffee industry has been focusing on “the carbon angle”. The green coffee trader Sucafina announced in April 2025 that it had partnered with the Specialty Coffee Association to offset emissions from two of the SCA’s trade shows by “supporting tree planting and agroforestry in Burundi” which “ties into a broader strategy to scale regenerative farming, renew aging trees and strengthen market access for Burundian coffee”.

Nestlé also touts the potential for coffee farms in its supply chain to “contribute to significant carbon removal through carbon sequestration”, while Rainforest Alliance has promoted access to the carbon market, encouraging farmers to generate and sell “carbon removal units” through regenerative practices and carbon sequestration.

Carbon sequestration is an important element of regenerative agriculture, and well-managed coffee farms can act as carbon sinks. But as Fraser points out, there are problems with focusing on carbon capture above all else. “We found that there’s a risk that by focusing so much on soil carbon sequestration, companies are distracting from the real need to reduce emissions,” she says.

“There’s a real risk also with the way that these companies frame regenerative agriculture for climate, because if you just narrow down on this one outcome, you’re taking away some of the other really important parts linked to regenerative agriculture, like biodiversity conservation and ecosystem health”.

Yet Another Coffee Certification

In September 2025, Rainforest Alliance launched a regenerative agriculture certification. The new certification, the nonprofit said in a press release, provides farmers with “a clear, science-based certification pathway for measuring progress and outcomes across five impact areas: soil health and fertility, climate resilience, biodiversity, water stewardship, and livelihoods”. The reward? The chance to “[unlock] new market opportunities through certification”.

A month later, Nespresso announced it would sell “the world’s first Rainforest Alliance Certified regenerative coffees”, but without detailing the benefits for farmers, or whether it had paid a premium for said coffees. Alongside Rainforest Alliance, multiple other organisations have launched their own regenerative agriculture certifications, among them Regenerative Organic, Ecocert, and Regenified.

COMSA is investigating whether to pursue a regenerative certification, but will only do so if it makes sense for its almost 1,500 members. “Certifications mean costs and additional documentation work, trainings just for farmers to be aware on how to comply”, the cooperative’s general manager Rodolfo Peñalba says. “It’s a big investment outside of doing the work. We wish we didn’t need even one certification and could focus on producing responsibly, but we know that the market doesn’t work that way, and certifications gatekeep differentials and recognition”.

The coop already has Rainforest Alliance, USDA Organic, and even Biodynamic certification (Peñalba notes that, while the latter is a philosophical fit, it doesn’t see much demand from customers). “To add a certificate, we must evaluate the proposition”, he says.

Dionisio agrees, noting that certifications add additional costs without always offering financial incentive for farmers. “We do not see a practical difference between organic and regenerative organic certification”.

Whether or not they decide to obtain certification, both cooperatives and their members are already practising regenerative agriculture, like many coffee farmers around the world. For those still relying on solely conventional farming, there is an obvious need to move towards regenerative methods. Reports like Technoserve’s offer clear examples of the economic benefits of such a move.

Nestlé, to its credit, is financially backing the transition. In 2021, the company announced it would invest $1.3 billion across five years to help farmers in its supply chain move towards regenerative practices. (Of course, the investment is overshadowed somewhat by the $94 billion in sales and $18 billion in net profit it reported in 2021.) Even that $1.3 billion is a shortfall, however: Technoserve’s report notes that a total of $4 billion is needed over a seven-year period in order to fund an effective transition industry-wide.

As Nestlé’s and other coffee giants’ income reports show, the money is there—it’s the will that is lacking. The funding gap points to the overall hesitation among the largest coffee companies to fully instigate these changes. As NewClimate Institute’s report notes, “the uptake of regenerative agriculture among large food companies has yet to point to a real transformation in food production practices. Companies are using watered-down definitions of regenerative agriculture, while continuing business as usual”.

The Value of Soil

Ultimately, the push for regenerative agriculture from coffee’s most powerful companies and organisations feels like another climate solution being mandated from the top down to fulfil corporate sustainability targets. Meanwhile, farmers across the globe have been integrating these methods into their growing practices for generations, to little acclaim.

Clearly there’s a need to encourage more producers to switch to regenerative practices if they haven’t already. But rather than burdening them with yet another certification process, it would be simpler to give them the tools—and reward them financially—and let them decide how best to implement them.

Rommel Melghem, head of HR at COMSA and manager of the cooperative’s training farm, Finca Biodinámica La Fortaleza, hopes that the industry as a whole recognises the work that farmers and cooperatives are already doing to grow coffee sustainably. “We build capacity and consciousness, not for a certificate but because we understand we are parts of Creation, not creators”, he says. “We can continue growing the process and have larger human-scale impacts by working with like-minded people in all sectors”.

For Dionisio, the focus on regenerative practices is a multi-generational process. “We want younger generations to know there is a value built into that soil”, she says. “If our soils are poor, the farmers will be poor. If the soils are rich, farmers will have abundance”.